But this proved to not be the right spot. Later on I realized this was not the correct spot logically, but putting code here would work. It just wouldn’t make sense underneath the title “matchWorkspace.” You shouldn’t even get to the matchWorkspace function if you’re just showing all workspaces anyway.

And that was what I wanted. The snippet above already includes my adjustment. Line 73 is the logic that reads the gsettings schema. And it took me a while to get this part to work. At first I had the read-schema code up beside the other global.settings.get_boolean at line 112 in the AppSwitcher.prototype._init: function(binding). But it took me a while to figure out the scoping of the variable was not correct for my needs. Reading the gsetting schema in the prototype did not set the variable for the function at line 73, function getWindowsForBinding(binding).

I also had to learn about the gsettings schema. I’ve dabbled with dconf before. But apparently adding a new key is a little more complicated that just

Overview

I use open-source software every day, since November 2015. That was the year of Linux on the Desktop for me. I picked as my desktop environment Cinnamon.

I normally don’t use virtual desktops or “workspaces,” but on one laptop I was for a while. It was actually a KDE Plasma 5 installation, which reinforced my plans to stick to Cinnamon as my heavyweight DE. However, the KDE Plasma virtual workspaces worked fine, and provided all sorts of options for the window list and alt-tab switcher for listing windows across all the workspaces. Cinnamon did not have such an offering, so when I finally replaced KDE with Cinnamon on that workstation, I just reverted to my single-workspace workflow.

I told someone online (probably in the #korora channel at irc.freenode.net) that I was willing to pay money for Cinnamon to provide a window list option for displaying the windows from all workspaces. Well, as of October 2, I guess I owe myself $50.

Check out my merged pull request to Cinnamon! I added the feature, as a boolean setting, to the mainline Cinnamon window list applet. So eventually my option will be included in the Fedora Cinnamon build down the line. For the time being, though, I’m going to continue to use my separate applet that provides my feature.

dconf save and load to file

GNOME-based desktops use a settings utility that is a little similar to the registry of a famous non-free operating system. I’ll spare you the ideological diatribe and get to the task at hand. I use Cinnamon from the Linux Mint project, and it is based on GNOME 3.

Loading dconf settings from file

The reverse is also as easy.
Make sure you use the same directory in the layout.

dconf load / < my-cinnamon.dconf

The story

This post is a precursor to a discussion about manipulating the settings programmatically in xfconf-query, which is the settings cli tool for the xfce desktop environment.
I wrote a wrapper script for a project of mine. Check out dconf.sh at github underneath my project bgconf.